As technology has evolved the functionality of mobile devices, such as laptops computers, cellular phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and media players, has become correspondingly more robust. Such devices now offer capabilities that were once the exclusive domain of personal computers (PCs). In fact, some of these mobile devices now resemble small, low-end PCs with wireless access to data networks, including the Internet.
Unlike desktops or portable computers, hand-held devices and other wireless communication devices typically fail to include a keyboard, a large display, a mouse, a printer, or any other peripheral. In some instances such peripherals do exist but are either cumbersome or too small for effective use. Such devices may utilize a docking station or a port replicator to attach a standard set of peripheral devices to the computing platform. A physical connection is made, for example, between the hand-held device and the docking station, at which time the docking station provides the necessary ports to connect to those peripherals.
The primary purpose of replicators or docking stations is to provide a fast and convenient mechanism to allow the hand-held device to attach or detach from peripheral devices. This is achieved by plugging the hand-held device into the docking station, however, it is not necessary to physically connect and disconnect each of the peripheral devices from the hand-held device.
With the emergence of wireless technologies, hardwired docking station connections are replaced with a wireless connection, typically by means of an ultra-wideband (UWB) connection. Examples for such wireless docking stations can be found in US Patent Application Publications Nos. 20050246470, and 20060061963, incorporated herein by reference for the useful understanding of the background of the invention. The solutions in the above-mentioned publications enable wireless connectivity between a hand-held device and its respective peripherals by providing a wireless computer docking system. Specifically, a hand-held device is equipped with a UWB wireless transceiver to form a wireless connection with UWB-enabled peripheral devices without the need for a physical docking station. That is, these solutions are based on a UWB link that emulates an undefined type of input/output (I/O) bus.
Such architectures introduce major drawbacks that limit the performance of hand-held devices. For example, the UWB link requires a dedicated-controller to allow the I/O bus to operate with different peripheral standards. It also requires the installation of dedicated software to map peripheral interfaces to the I/O bus. In addition, the UWB link multiplexes between peripheral devices in order to transfer data on a relatively small bandwidth.
Another type of modular connectivity solution is based on peripheral interface cards. Typically, the peripheral interface cards are stackable, enabling connectivity to each other. In addition, all interface cards must be connected to a base plane card which facilitates the communication with the hand-held computing device. To this end, the base plane includes a central processing unit (CPU) and a memory unit. Connectivity between cards is enabled using, for example, a PCI/104-Express™ standard interface, published by the PC/104 Embedded Consortium in 2008 in an article titled “What is a PCl/104-Express?” An example for such a modular connectivity solution is commercially available by Digital Logic. Other examples for implementing modular connectivity may be found in US patent application publication No. 20030198015 and in U.S. Pat. No. 5,825,617, incorporated herein by reference for the useful understanding of the background of the invention.
One drawback of existing modular docking stations described in the related art is that the base plane card consists of a CPU and a memory unit and the operation of a station requires the installation of dedicated software to map peripheral interfaces to the I/O bus. As a result, the cost of such is significantly increased. In addition, existing modular docking stations do not allow wireless connectivity between the peripheral devices and hand-held computing devices.
It would be therefore advantageous to provide a docking system that enables a modular and wireless connectivity while overcoming the drawbacks of prior art solutions.